Arts writer
THIS month sees a group of friends and musicians set out on a journey from Joburg to Cape Town and back again. Along the way they’ll pit-stop at a number of cities, towns, ‘dorps and no-wheresvilles’. Inspired by Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue and Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tours, this intrepid group hope to take their sounds to new places while having a grand time along the way.
Titled The Tolbos (Tumbleweed) Tour, the showcase is supported by the Concerts SA Mobility Fund. It will feature Andre Kriel of Black Cat Bones, Les Javan, Nicole Theron, Michael Canfield and Rian Malan. Scheduled guest performers include Guy Spencer Collins, Valliant Swart, Crimson House, Jonny Blundell and Greg Georgiades.
The centrepiece of the tour will be a performance on Saturday at Schalkenbosch Wine Estate in Tulbagh, which encompasses the first annual Fringe Music Festival of the Tulbagh Spring Arts Festival from Friday to Sunday.
The Schalkenbosch show is scheduled to be an all-day affair featuring all of the artists separately and together.
Andre Kriel is a founding member of Black Cat Bones. He also leads southern punk act Bandolero, and jams with Coelacanth. Les Javan has composed movie and TV scores, most recently the KykNet series Vlug na Egypte. In a previous incarnation, he was artist in residence of Solms Delta’s indigenous music project and a champion of the rural Cape vastrap. His albums include Hiervandaan(2010) and Ek is Lief vir Jou(2012).
Michael Canfield is a former child prodigy drummer who first hit the road with Sammy Davis Jr. at the age of nine and never looked back. A one-time New Yorker, Canfield’s session credits include ‘almost everyone who was anyone’ in late 20th century American music. Now he plays vastrap, often on the ukulele. Johannesburg-based Nicole Theron is best known for her solo album Perspicacity, and for her emotive live performances from theatres, clubs and Oppikoppi.
Author of seminal text My Traitors Heart, Rian Malan is a songwriter whose dabbling in Afrikaans music earned him the dubious title of a “one-man cultural revolution” from Koos Kombuis. Malan released a CD titled Alien Inboorling in 2005 and has written a string of hits for Radio Kalahari Orkes.
With combined musical obsessions ranging from everything from New Orleans Cajun music to Parisian swing, local “head music” and old-time rural Afrikaans forms, expect a varied musical palette.
See them at The Bluestown Sessions at Mercury Live on Thursday at 8pm, (R50, www.tixsa.co.za); at La Cabane on Friday at 8pm (R30, 063 031 2569, clare@rollingaudio.co.za); at Schalkenbosch Wine Estate on Saturday from noon until 10pm (R80, 023 230 0654, www.tixsa.co.za) and at De Kreeft Stamkafee at Saronsberg Teater on Sunday at 12pm (R30, 023 230 0179).
l www.facebook.com/TolbosTour